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The Pursuit of Words

Our lives is a pursuit of meaning. We live in a constant pursuit of a meaning which we intend to attach to the life that we by an accident of nature have been bestowed with. It is through art and literature that we pursue that elusive meaning. Rest is accidental, existential, meant only to sustain life.

Some people give up this quest early in life and oscillate between two extremes. They either consider their own lives a nuisance, lacking any value and devoid of purpose, or they place a crazily high value on otherwise inconsequential and ordinary life, and demand that the world at a pedestal as high and sacred as the pedestal on which they place themselves. They have no balance in live, and though troubled, are not searching for any. Few who are unable to bear with the animalistic life of extremes, set out on a quest.

But why should this life be sustained? It actually makes no sense, if the purpose of life were to be sustaining life itself. We are not even a dot on the timeless scale of the universe. What difference would a couple of years here or there make to you as we'll as to the world. The quest for the meaning of life is through words. Man invented language to understand the world around and also to tolerate it.

Without words, it is hard to survive the brutality of the world which passes by us in such a brusque manner that we are apt to be left with more than a few bruised thoughts. With words we explain the unlove to ourselves and reach out for love which could be ours. Words rise from misery, but every written word announces the demolition of one such misery, in its own small way. People who haven't felt miserable ever, can not write. I am one such soul living in constant misery and gain intermittent relief through words. But I am not a writer in that sense. I do not write on the workdays to submit to magazines, and I do not have a study where I retire to, in order to weave words.

But words are small bandages which I put on my soul, thus hoping to embalm the pain that I earn through the week. Every weekend, it opens a door through which I enter in to a world, an underground with dim orange lights and loud music. I meet some kindred souls there, some partners in crime, who are also there nursing their wounds. We rest our weary shoulders against one another, and suffer in silence, and come out of this little spa for soul, healed, recovered and ready for more

Today is the day of Indian, or should I say, Hindu festival of
Karvachauth, much popularized by Bollywood. Initially a festival of Northern
India, now it is widely celebrated. The festival is primarily of a day of
fasting, observed by married women, praying for the long life of their husbands. As is
the practice, the festival is marked by severe criticism every year by
over-jealous atheists, fanatic feminists and bigoted secularist, who claim that the festival is
patriarchal, regressive and anti-woman. If one considers those rants to be
true, one would believe that there is huge amount of physical and emotional
trauma that womenfolk are subjected to, in order to get them around to fast on
the day. However, if one were to visit
any of the markets in Delhi, the scenario is quite contrary. You will find happy,
joyous women on the streets of Delhi, excitedly visiting beauty parlors, with
their husbands dragged themselves behind them, holding the kids as wife gets
Mehandi to her hands- do…